The Closure-Happy “Breaking Bad” Finale

I’m quite certain that many, many people adored Vince Gilligan’s kickass ending to “Breaking Bad”: it’s easy to sense that from even a brief surf in the celebratory waters online. Nothing I write can erase someone else’s pleasure: and why should it? Pleasure is an argument for itself. But if you don’t want to read a critical take, stop here. In my own way, I also enjoyed aspects of the finale, particularly the scene with Skyler. And yet, I did not like the episode. Maybe it was just me—I’ll read all the recaps, and I’ll soon find out—but halfway through, at around the time that Walt was gazing at Walt, Jr., I became fixated on the idea that what we were watching must be a dying fantasy on the part of Walter White, not something that was actually happening—at least not in the “real world” of the previous seasons.

And, if that were indeed the case, I’d be writing a rave.

I mean, wouldn’t this finale have made far more sense had the episode ended on a shot of Walter White dead, frozen to death, behind the wheel of a car he couldn’t start? Certainly, everything that came after that moment possessed an eerie, magical feeling—from the instant that key fell from the car’s sun visor, inside a car that was snowed in. Walt hit the window, the snow fell off, and we were off to the races. Even within this stylized series, there was a feeling of unreality—and a strikingly different tone from the episode that preceded this one. In “Granite State,” after all, each of the show’s action-hero fantasies were punctured, then deflated. Walt’s new identity doesn’t leave him safe in the Bahamas, with WiFi, free to plan his comeback. He’s trapped in New Hampshire, paying ten thousand dollars for an hour of poker—alone, powerless, sick. Jesse’s bold attempted escape from Nazi meth slavery doesn’t buy him freedom; it means his ex-girlfriend gets shot, and Brock is left a traumatized orphan. Walter’s clever phone call to Skyler was certainly a fantastic Hail Mary pass, as Saul acknowledges. But, in the aftermath, we can see that this brilliant stratagem doesn’t get Skyler off the hook: instead, she’s under the thumb of the law, working as a taxi dispatcher, her house trashed.

Also, Walt still has cancer. He’s sick. In fact, he seems like he’s dying.

Yet a week later, in the show’s finale, every one of these spiky edges gets sanded over. Gretchen and Elliot are cartoon assholes—monstrous foodies!—and the Gray Matter backstory, which once seemed ambiguous (Had they really stolen Walt’s ideas? Or had he huffed off, as Gretchen once suggested?), shrivels into Walt’s version of the story. Walt forces them to launder his money, emasculating Elliot and his little knife; Walt’s so pure, he refuses to take their money. Badger and Skinny Pete agree to participate in this plan, rather than, say, turn Walt in to the police and get a huge reward. We never see how Walt managed to find Badger and Skinny Pete in the first place, without being noticed. The unifying element of this episode is that Walter himself is never noticed, not during a drive across the country after the cops descend on that unfinished Dimple Pinch, and not in his own home town, despite how we’ve been told, again and again, that Walt is now a wanted criminal, with his face all over the papers in Albuquerque, and on national television, and that if he goes out in public, he’ll be caught immediately. The Schwartzes, who are two Bill Gates–level celebrities, have no effective security measures in their house; they push no panic button in the many minutes before Walt indicates that there are assassins outside.

No one spots Walt when he enters Skyler’s home, either—or when he leaves. No one notices when Walt goes to see his son for the last time, even though you’d imagine that area would be flooded with surveillance. Walt is not noticed even when he steps inside a brightly lit, crowded Albuquerque restaurant, where he sits down with Lydia and Todd. I mean, it’s not as though the man’s a master of disguise: he’s got hair again, so he looks similar to the way he looked back when he was a teacher at a local high school—and in fact, he’s even more noticeable, because he looks homeless, ragged, and Unabomber-like. Has Walt magically hacked everyone’s cell-phone cameras? (@albuquerquejoe: Check it out! Walter White dining out with some well-shod bitch and a Nazi!)

So many moments felt peculiarly underlined: we see the ricin stirred into Lydia’s tea in a dream-like closeup, and then we also get to hear Walt on the phone with Lydia, rubbing it in, letting her know that she’s dying. The things that we never see in this episode are the painful things, many of them involving children: Lydia’s daughter bereaved, Brock as an orphan.

Of course, there’s the climactic sequence, which rivals any of Walt’s earlier mastermind plots: Walt builds a fantastic remote-controlled super-gun that kills almost all of his Nazi enemies. Even though Lydia has told the Nazis that Walt is back, and the Nazis are planning to kill him, they let him in. They don’t shoot him immediately. Indeed, they have a whole conversation with him. O.K., that might happen, and it often does happen, whenever people meet their enemies in television shows, only to fatally underestimate them. But in what universe would Uncle Jack, heretofore so pragmatic and unflappable, get so incredibly offended at Walt calling Jesse his partner? In what world would he then pull Jesse out of his cage, so that Walt could see that he was suffering? In Walt’s dreams, that’s where. Or at least, that’s how it felt to me.

In any case, Walt then knocks Jesse to the ground, to protect him. He hits the trigger. The guns go off. There’s that glorious cinematic bloodbath, and when it ends, there are two perfectly symmetrical survivors left standing. Todd survives, so that he can be strangled by Jesse in an echo of Walter’s Season 1 murder of Krazy 8. Uncle Jack survives, too. In hardboiled tradition, he picks up a cigarette, puts it in his mouth, and tries to negotiate before Walt blows his brains out, demonstrating that Walt cares less about money than he does about justice. The entire sequence is nearly video-game-like as pure revenge.

The tenderer, more emotional scene came earlier. That would be the lovely and beautifully filmed sequence in Skyler’s kitchen, in which Walt gets his redemption, as well as his say. He offers Skyler those lottery numbers—so that she can get closure on Hank’s death, and give Marie closure, as well. In addition, Skyler will have new evidence to offer the cops. Walt lies to her about his money being gone, so that she’ll be able to accept the dirty cash when it eventually comes to Walt, Jr., as a trust fund. Most miraculously, he drops the insistence that everything he’s done has been for his family. “It was for me,” he admits to Skyler. “I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really—I was alive.” Then he strokes baby Holly’s head, as Skyler looks on, in loving silence.

It was a genuinely poignant scene, and well-played, but only if Walter was actually dead. Which I am choosing to believe he was.

Don’t be mad, readers: as the Internet people say, YMMV, and very likely does. From my perspective, at least as I write, shortly after the finale aired, if this episode in fact took place in reality, it was troubling, and yes, disappointing, if only because the story ended by confirming Walt’s most grandiose notions: that he is, in fact, all-powerful, the smartest guy in the room, the one who knocks. Anyone other than Walt becomes a mere reflection of this journey to redemption. (With the exception of Jesse, who had the most mysterious scene: a poetic fugue of his own, in which he created what felt like a small coffin.*) It’s not that Walt needed to suffer, necessarily, for the show’s finale to be challenging, or original, or meaningful: but Walt succeeded with so little true friction—maintaining his legend, reconciling with family, avenging Hank, freeing Jesse, all genuine evil off-loaded onto other, badder bad guys—that it felt quite unlike the destabilizing series that I’d been watching for years. If, instead, we were watching Walt’s compensatory fantasy, it was a fascinating glimpse into the man’s mind—akin to the one in the movie “Mulholland Drive,” a poignant, tragic attempt to fix a life that is unfixable.

Still, even if right now I feel that the finale fell short, either because it was too obvious (look under your seats! closure for everyone!) or wayyy too subtle (a cinematic fantasy that never declared itself, except in my own tiny head), that doesn’t mean that the show failed as a whole. I’d bet that we’ll all be arguing about “Breaking Bad” for quite a while. It was that good, for that long. As with Walt’s meth, this brutal season still comes in for me at ninety-two-per-cent purity. If that’s not perfect, if that’s not what I was hoping for, it’s still one powerful batch.

*Update: Yes! I know. I had forgotten all about that story Jesse told in his recovery group, about building a wooden box in shop class, which makes this moment all the more poignant and revelatory. No need to alert me in the comments. I’m clearly no Walter White.

Photograph by Ursula Coyote/AMC.

Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s television critic, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.